Texas to execute man convicted of strangling woman while driving

[September 27, 2018]  By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Texas plans on Thursday to execute a man convicted of kidnapping a woman and choking her to death while driving as lawyers for the inmate seek to spare his life, arguing he did not murder her and was convicted due to faulty forensic evidence.

Daniel Acker, 46, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at the state's death chamber in Huntsville at 6 p.m. (2300 GMT).

If the execution goes ahead, it will be the 18th this year in the United States and the 10th in Texas, which has put more prisoners to death than any state since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

Acker was convicted of murdering Marquetta George in 2000.

The two had lived together and got into an argument after Acker believed George was seeing another man. At one point, Acker forced George into his pickup truck and drove off with her, court records showed.

George's body was found shortly after that on the side of a road a few miles (km) away from the home she shared with Acker.

Her heart and lungs were lacerated, and the bones in her face were broken. She had a shattered skull and injuries to her neck that forensic witnesses for the state testified were consistent with strangulation, the records showed.

Lawyers for Acker filed a last-minute appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, saying there was no murder and George jumped from the truck moving at high speed because she did not want to face the man with whom Acker accused her of having an affair.

"The state's case was based on the now-discredited strangling-while-driving hypothesis, a virtually impossible feat," they said in their filing.

"Mr. Acker has taken full responsibility for the victim's abduction and has expressed remorse for that act from the day he turned himself in shortly after the accident," they said.

Texas said in its Supreme Court filing that Acker was duly convicted and a jury rightly concluded that George's death was due to strangulation, blunt-force injury, or a combination of the two.

"Acker produces no new evidence showing he did not commit the crime but continues to assert that George's death resulted from her leap from the vehicle - a theory rejected by the jury at the time of trial," Texas said in its filing.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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